appear in a night.

All the while the money-getting and -losing continue. There is no pause.
The masculine element of such society is made up of men who carry the
anxieties of their work into parlors and ball-rooms. The late dinners
and later parties are frequented by fathers and brothers who know that
at counting-rooms and offices they must be every morning by ten o'clock,
to worry all day with an anxiety that kills. These noble scions of male
American aristocracy carry protested notes on their dyspeptic
countenances, and the female specimens their bills for jewelry and
gorgeous wearing apparel. The surface of the whole creation is not even
good veneer, but the thinnest sort of a scratched varnish.

What absurd fictions, then, are our society novels!

We have in reality our social life, and it is of the best and highest.
The millions of homes over the land have their comedies and tragedies
well worth putting to record, but they are American, not European. Why
cannot our gifted authors, such as Miss Mathews, for example, turn to
these and give us a fiction worthy the name? The book she has given us,
with all its defects, is entertaining. From title-page to close the
interest in the plot and characters holds the reader who does not look
too narrowly into the probability.

Of the same sort of work is the volume entitled _That Girl from Texas_,
by Jeannette H. Walworth (Belford, Clarke & Co.), an amusing story under
a bad name. The idea is not so original, as Sancho Panza remarked, but
what we might have met it before. The "Fair Barbarian" who invades
England and crops out in English novels, much to our discredit, and the
like character from the far West who assaults fashionable life East, are
getting to be somewhat monotonous. Society is shocked in both localities
by the rough ways of the maiden; but as she is ever beautiful, rich, and
shrewd, she plays a leading role and comes out victor in the end. If
"Elmira does not stab that deep-dyed villain, the Count," she
circumvents him in the most adroit and unexpected manner, so that virtue
triumphs and vice is exposed and punished.

We cannot comprehend why it is that when a sprig of English nobility
seeks our shores, he should always be a cad or an idiot, and in many
instances blooming specimens of both. Time was when this specimen proved
a fraud, and the so-called lord turned out a lackey. But now his
ancestors are the real lace, but his intellect, morals, and manners a